In September 2017, I interviewed a senior figure within the Australian Labor Party in his office in Canberra. At one point in our discussion he told me:
The biggest contest in Australian politics is essentially around which issue you can make ascendant, so if you’re [a] conservative Opposition leader, you want to make border security or the lack thereof and debt and deficits the issues that are ascendant in people’s minds, and then the carbon tax. But certainly in 2010, prior to the hung parliament and the cross-party agreement on climate, it was all about border security and debt and deficits.
He continued, explaining:
